Lactose Intolerance

The hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant, according to a new study carried out by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University.

"One possibility is that these differences are evidence of a powerful selection process, through which the Stone Age hunter-gatherers' genes were lost due to some significant advantage associated with the capacity to digest milk," says Anna Linderholm. "The other possibility is that we simply are not descended from this group of Stone Age people."